Transcript:

Hi guys, Keith here with Opengear, coming at you with another tech video. Today we would like to introduce a new ZTP feature. We recently announced it with our new 315-1 firmware. We are really excited about it, and we think you guys will be too.

Zero Touch Provisioning, at its core, is an automation solution that’s designed to reduce errors and save time. Opengear pioneered ZTP in the SMART Out-Of-Band sector. Router and switch companies have been doing ZTP for years. Large scale Opengear deployments are requiring faster, more flexible implementations. As the name suggests, Zero Touch Provisioning requires no manual intervention.

Zero Touch Provisioning is a rapid deployment solution; simply just rack it and stack it. DHCP automatically recognizes the Opengear model and supplies the correct configuration file at boot time. So the process is simply
Create the master config template
Configure the DHCP server to recognize the Console Server model and then it supplies the method for downloading the OPG or CONFIG.XML File via HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, or FTP. The foundation of ZTP is built on DHCP Option 43. And the Golden Template that we’re talking about here is then downloaded from the DHCP server using one of those methods – the HTTP,HTTPS, TFTP, or FTP servers.
Once it’s downloaded, it’ll automatically load and apply that config file to your console server.

Again, ZTP is built on DHCP Option 43. This is a quick screenshot of wireshark where it lists a bunch of different options that DHCP provides and we’ll point out the configuration of the DHCP server here in just a minute where we identify the vendor-specific information for Opengear. Here is our configuration of an ISC-DHCP server. Really very simple — all you simply need is the six lines that you see here, starting with the options space Opengear down to the Opengear config URL. This is where you are going to load those Opengear Golden Template images. And that can be in OPG or config XML.

So as you go through the process of the DHCP Server, once you have it configured and started, enabled, simply rack and stack your Opengear device. Once it’s powered up, it will go through and hit the DHCP server and go through a normal DHCP process of grabbing an IP address. It will send back the information back to the DHCP server. You’ll see here, once it has that IP address, it will go through and grab the OPG from the location that you set up inside that configuration file that we recently looked at.

Check us out on Twitter at Opengear #ZTP. We would love to hear your feedback and comments about the feature. Again we are really excited about it. We think it will be a feature that will be very beneficial to everybody.